Evelyn Waugh Biography - eNotes.com Evelyn Waugh Biography Homework Help Evelyn Waugh Biography Evelyn Waugh’s biting attacks on British society and its mores were matched only by his love for them. Therein lies the unique achievement of Waugh’s work, which satirized British aristocratic life with great affection. His seminal novel, Brideshead Revisited, perfectly captures this seeming dichotomy. The expansive novel, regularly ranked among the century’s greatest, is a kind of soap opera writ large, with wry observations about its upper-crust characters. At the same time, it is heralded for perfectly capturing the pre-World War II moment in Britain. Questions of faith, which were so crucial to Waugh’s beliefs, also figure prominently in the epic novel. Ultimately, perhaps it was Waugh’s faith that allowed him to balance his blatant criticisms with knowing warmth. Facts and Trivia Though his father and older brother were writers and editors, Waugh did not immediately take up the pen. He first tried being an artist. Despite the alleged homosexuality of his youth, Waugh was married twice. His first (and quite short-lived) marriage was to a woman whose name also happened to be Evelyn.

Waugh wrote three novels, dubbed the Sword of Honour trilogy, about his experiences during World War II. In his adulthood, Waugh became a devout and conservative Catholic. He was very vocal about his dissatisfaction with the changes instituted by the Church in the 1960s. Waugh put out an extraordinary body of work during his lifetime, but that was only a portion of his writing. Waugh’s diaries and correspondence were released posthumously. link Link Evelyn Waugh Published by Salem Press, Inc. From the 1940’s until his death in 1966, Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (waw) served as bête noire for left-wing critics on both sides of the Atlantic, a role he seemed to enjoy. He was born in London on October 28, 1903, the second son of Arthur Waugh, author and managing director of the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall, and Catherine Charlotte Raban. Evelyn’s father and brother, Alec, had attended Sherborne School, but Alec had been expelled and shortly thereafter published The Loom of Youth (1917), a sensational exposé of public school life.

Sherborne was thus out of the question for Evelyn, so he attended Lancing College before going up to Oxford University. In 1925 Waugh left Hertford College, Oxford, with a modest third-class degree in history. As a young man whose father and elder brother were firmly established as professional writers and editors, he might have been thought a natural candidate for a literary career himself. Instead, he tried several fields first—including art, to which he was strongly attracted—before turning to letters. He served brief tenures as a schoolmaster at two obscure public schools. The experience was a profoundly unhappy one, which led to Waugh’s attempted suicide by drowning, yet it also furnished the material for his first novel. In the autumn of 1927, Waugh met Evelyn Gardner. The two were soon married, and Waugh’s literary career was launched with two books: Rossetti, a commercial failure published in 1928, and Decline and Fall, a critical and commercial success appearing the same year.

Decline and Fall is a madcap satire in the style of Voltaire’s Candide (1759), with an ironic depiction of Oxford, spurious and neurotic schoolmasters, and the penal system (which Waugh likens to an English public school). In 1930 his Vile Bodies satirized the Bright Young People, the English equivalent of flappers in the United States. This novel, like his first, was wildly funny, and he had found his audience. In contrast, his personal life was in ruins—just as he achieved literary success, his wife of fewer than two years deserted him for another man. That he peppered his novels with faithless young wives for the rest of his career testifies to the depth of his bitterness. In 1929 he had begun traveling in the Mediterranean with his wife. After his divorce, he traveled incessantly for three years—in Abyssinia, Africa, and South America. The results of this compulsive peregrination were the travel books Labels, Remote People, and Ninety-two Days as well as considerable raw material for future novels. Waugh’s third novel, Black Mischief, appeared in 1932.

It is certainly a satire of British... (The entire section is 1129 words.) Get Free Access Start your free trial with eNotes for complete access to this resource and thousands more. 30,000+ Study Guides Save time with thousands of teacher-approved book and topic summaries. Get Homework Help Ask real teachers questions on any subject or search 300,000+ answers. On the Go Access Are you a teacher or educator? Find out about our Teacher’s Edition . More Content: Biography (hide) link Link Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh was born in Hampstead, a suburb of London, in 1903 to Arthur and Catherine Waugh. He attended Lancing College from 1917 to 1924 and Hertford College, Oxford, from 1921 to 1924, from which he left without taking a degree. Although Waugh turned to writing novels only after aborted careers as a draftsman, a schoolmaster, and a journalist, his family background was literary; his father directed Chapman and Hall publishers until 1929, and his older brother Alec published his first novel, The Loom of Youth, in 1917.

Waugh’s years at Oxford and his restless search for employment during the 1920’s brought him experiences that were later fictionalized in several of his novels. After leaving Oxford in 1924, he enrolled in the Heatherley School of Fine Art, where he aspired to be a draftsman; later in that year, he was apprenticed to a printer for a brief period. His employment as a schoolmaster in Wales in 1925 and in Buckinghamshire in 1926 formed the background for his first novel, Decline and Fall. His struggle to establish himself as a writer and his participation in the endless parties of London’s aristocratic youth during the last years of the 1920’s are fictionalized in his second novel, Vile Bodies. In 1927, Waugh was engaged to Evelyn Gardner and, despite the objections of her family, married her in 1928 when his financial prospects seemed more secure after the publication of his life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his first novel.

In 1929, while Waugh was working in seclusion on Vile Bodies, his wife announced that she was having an affair; the couple, temperamentally unsuited to each other, were divorced that year. The next seven years of... (The entire section is 714 words.) Get Free Access link Link Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (waw) was born in London, England, on October 28, 1903, the second son of Arthur Waugh, author and managing director of the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall, and Catherine Charlotte Raban. Evelyn Waugh was five years younger than his brother, Alec Raban Waugh, who would also become a professional writer. The boys grew up in the London suburb of Hampstead, with Evelyn feeling very much overshadowed by his gregarious, good-natured, athletic brother. Evelyn’s writings, his correspondence, and anecdotal evidence clearly document a sibling rivalry that existed, on his part, for the rest of his life, while the elder brother appears to have harbored no such feelings whatsoever.

After having been acknowledged for many years as a more eminent writer than his brother, Evelyn still bristled when an article suggested that Alec had sold more books than he. Evelyn’s father and brother had attended Sherborne School, but Alec had been dismissed following a sexual misadventure. He then made matters worse, from the Sherborne point of view, by publishing The Loom of Youth (1917), a sensational exposé of public school life. Interestingly, Alec Waugh would go on to write more than forty books but would not duplicate the success of this first novel until the publication of Island in the Sun(1956). At any rate, his explosion onto the literary scene made it impossible for his younger brother to attend Sherborne. Evelyn Waugh attended Lancing College, one of the less fashionable public schools, before going up to the University of Oxford, where he had gained a scholarship to Hertford College. At Oxford, Waugh became a member of a set of intellectual and aesthetic dandies, several of whom would also have noteworthy literary careers. He dined and drank and enjoyed Oxford society enormously, while reading history in a desultory fashion.

As a result, he left the university in 1924 with a modest third-class degree. Waugh tried several vocations before finally turning to the profession of his father and brother. He studied art, to which he was strongly attracted, and cabinetmaking—he would later say that he considered himself a craftsman who made books as another person might make furniture. He taught briefly at two obscure public schools and was profoundly unhappy as a schoolmaster—so unhappy, in fact, that he attempted to drown himself in the ocean. His suicide attempt, however, ended as ludicrously as a scene from one of his novels when he was stung by a jellyfish and forced to return, smarting, to the shore. His ineffective schoolteaching, though, did give him material for his first novel. In the autumn of 1927, Waugh met and began to court Evelyn Gardner. The two were soon married on the strength of Waugh’s literary prospects. His first two books appeared in 1928. The first, Rossetti: His Life and Works, a study of the...

(The entire section is 1189 words.) link Link Evelyn Waugh’s earliest novels were received, and praised, as farces and amusing romps. His essential seriousness of purpose was ignored or misunderstood. He was long viewed as a talented entertainer whose language and syntax were flawless and whose plots were delightfully inventive. As the body of his work grew and as he reiterated his theme of the spiritual emptiness of modern life, however, critics were forced to take note. Eventually, to those who shared his view of humanity’s fallen nature, who shared his passions and his fears, he became much more than an entertainer. He became a kind of witty Jeremiah, prophesying the end of grace, both divine and earthly, from behind a mask of scornful laughter.

(The entire section is 119 words.) ALEC WAUGH, 83, AUTHOR OF 'ISLAND IN THE SUN' - NYTimes.com ALEC WAUGH, 83, AUTHOR OF 'ISLAND IN THE SUN' By EDWIN McDOWELL Published: September 4, 1981 Alec Waugh, the author of 50 books during a career that spanned nearly 65 years and who was best known for ''Island in the Sun,'' died yesterday in Tampa (Fla.) General Hospital, two weeks after suffering a stroke. He was 83 years old. Mr. Waugh, five years older than his late brother, Evelyn, was at one time one of the best-known younger writers in England. He wrote his first novel, ''The Loom of Youth,'' in six and a half weeks while he was in the military. It was published in 1917, when he was 19 years old and in service overseas in World War I. He spent eight months in 1918 as a German prisoner of war. He later referred to his alma mater as ''The University of Mainz,'' the name of the prison camp.

Although he came to the United States frequently and for several decades lived part of each year at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, Mr. Waugh was not particularly famous in this country, except for the 1956 ''Island in the Sun.'' The colorful story of love, murder and political intrigue on the imaginary Caribbean island of Santa Maria was a book-club selection, was condensed in The Reader's Digest and was sold to the movies for a film tha t sta rred James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Harry Belafonte, Joan Collins and D orothy Dandridge. Peripatetic Life ''I made more in one month with 'Island in the Sun' than I did in 40 years of writing with a bout 38 books and c ountless stories,'' Mr. Waugh said the year after the book was publis hed. The money he earned writing enabled the author to live the sort of peripatetic life that intrigued him from the time he left school at 17 to join the army. In 1925, he resigned his position as literary adviser to his father's publishing concern, Chapman & Hill, and traveled to the South Seas.

After that, he was frequently on the go, telling an interviewer some years ago that he managed to see his three children ''three or four times a year.'' In his 1963 ''The Early Years of Alec Waugh,'' Mr. Waugh said he had not met his brother more than 20 times in 20 years, although they remained good friends. Mr. Waugh began visiting Tangier in 1958, and he later made it his semipermanent residence until he and his wife moved to Tampa last October, according to a family member. For most of his life, he had remained a man of fixed habits who wrote six mornings a week and who alternated books of fiction and nonfiction; the nonfiction was frequently about travel. He was shy and retiring in public. Furor at School ''The Loom of Youth'' was the first book to refer to homosexual relations in English public schools. It became an immediate sensation, but it also prompted the Sherborne School, which he had attended, to strike the names of Alec and his father from the alumni society, and the school refused to admit Evelyn Waugh.

The two names were restored in 1933 and both of Alec Waugh's sons attended the school. Mr. Waugh, who was previously married to Barbara Jacobs of England and Joan Chirnside of Australia, is survived by his wife, Virginia Sorensen, an author of children's novels. He also leaves three children by his second wife, Andrew, an officer in the Royal Navy stationed in Hong Kong; Peter of Reading, England, and Veronica Keeling of London,. There will be a service at St. John's Episcopal Church in Tampa at 11 A.M. tomorrow. The body will be cremated and the ashes flow to London to be buried in the family plot. Illustrations: photo of Alec Waugh My life as a Waugh | Life and style | The Guardian Family My life as a Waugh Peter Waugh's father was Alec, Evelyn Waugh's elder brother. He tells Patrick Barkham about the father whose love he couldn't accept – and the uncle who scared him Waugh stories ... Peter Waugh at home. His father was Alec Waugh, his uncle Evelyn Waugh.

Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian Family My life as a Waugh Peter Waugh's father was Alec, Evelyn Waugh's elder brother. He tells Patrick Barkham about the father whose love he couldn't accept – and the uncle who scared him Friday 25 November 2011 19.04 EST First published on Friday 25 November 2011 19.04 EST Share on Messenger Close Peter Waugh did not meet his father until he was six. Like many of his generation, he had been packed off overseas because of the second world war. When he returned, it was to meet a total stranger at a railway station. "I can still see this person running along the platform, but it wasn't him," he says. He couldn't picture his father – there were no memories from which to recognise him. But the family name is very recognisable. When people tentatively ask the boyish 73-year-old if he is ... the answer is yes. Peter is part of the Waugh dynasty. His father, Alec, was the elder brother of the author of Brideshead Revisited and Scoop and, in a different era, more feted than Evelyn for his writing.

A retired wine trader and photography teacher, Peter is not a writer; he is simply surrounded by them. It must be unnerving to find yourself popping up as a character in the diaries and fictions of an author. It is not merely Alec and Evelyn; there is Auberon, Evelyn's son, the journalist and acidic wit, and also Auberon's children, Sophia Watson, Daisy Waugh and Alexander Waugh. It was Alexander who, seven years ago, wrote Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family , a well-regarded history of five generations of Waugh men. The family's story started with another Alexander Waugh, a doctor and sadist known as "the Brute". His son, Arthur Waugh, reacted to his upbringing by smothering his elder son, Alec, with love, and all but ignoring his younger son, Evelyn. In Fathers and Sons, Alexander suggests that Arthur's spoiling of Alec completely excluded Evelyn, and left him angry and resentful, with a reputation for being a horrible father. Ironically, for one so steeped in love as a child, Peter's father – Alexander claims – was himself an absent father (and an inveterate philanderer).

Peter is very fond of Alexander, and does not quibble with his broad portrayal of the Waugh clan. But he has a realistic, unsentimental view of his own father, as well as his own memories and stories, which are every bit as rich in anecdote and extraordinary characters as any Waugh book. The youngest of three children of Alec and his second wife, Joan Chirnside, a wealthy Australian, Peter returned from Australia after the war with his mother, brother and sister and was pitched into forming a relationship with his father at an age when such things are usually well established. Aside from their first meeting at the railway station, another early memory he has of Alec is of their first walk together on Hampstead Heath. When they returned to the Waugh family flat, which had a buzzer that read "Wau gh", Peter could not read his own name. "When he was six, my father acted Hamlet. There's a picture of him, a little boy, with a little stick and a little hat, and I couldn't read my own name at the same age. It must've been a tremendous shock for him," he says. Alec Waugh was a charming, rather swashbuckling man.

Sam Leith has written of the Waughs' "patrilineal inability to pass an applecart without giving it a shove" and Alec was a bit of a rebel. He found fame with his thinly autobiographical novel, The Loom of Youth, which was published in 1917 while he was fighting in the trenches. It caused a sensation for its honest depictions of love among schoolboys. The headmaster of Sherborne, Alec's old school, was outraged and wrote to Alec in the trenches to say he had libelled the school. Alec was expelled from the Old Shirburnian Society, for former pupils. The Loom of Youth was published at just the right moment, thinks Peter, "when the public school system was being questioned – after the first world war". Alec gave lecture tours. "He was a very famous chap. When you consider Evelyn living under the shadow of all of that and his father adoring Dad rather than him ..." says Peter. Alec is sometimes credited with inventing the cocktail party, mixing adventurous alcoholic drinks at an adventurous hour when guests were only expecting tea. "The Americans really started it but Dad might have introduced it to England," smiles Peter. The parties helped woo the ladies.

Alec's first wife was beautiful but they had no children and at a party in London Alec met Joan. He was taken with her no-nonsense Australian attitude. "Mum used the word 'fuck' and Dad was shocked but impressed," says Peter. By the time he was conceived in Marrakech, he thinks his parents' marriage was pretty loveless. Both had affairs and were separated for most of his boyhood. Peter remembers his mother grumbling about his father when he was 17. "I said, 'He is your husband after all.' She said, 'No he's not – we were divorced years ago.' They had never told me. It was so vague, 'Oh, didn't we tell you?'". When he was nine, Peter was introduced to Evelyn. It is a vivid memory. His uncle sat behind an enormous desk in his library. "Bring him in," Evelyn called, and Peter was ushered into the room by Evelyn's wife, Laura. "Turn him round." Peter was spun round. "Take him away," Evelyn barked. "Can you imagine an uncle saying that to you?" says Peter. "Talk about intimidation." The terrified boy fell in love with his Aunt Laura.

"I thought Evelyn Waugh was an ogre and I was going to rescue her," he says. "I did see him being very funny, but Evelyn was cruel. My sister once asked about the pre-Raphaelites and he said, 'Do you know anything about painting?' and she was only a young girl and didn't, and he said, 'Well, I won't bother then.'" Peter agrees with Alexander that Evelyn being "a shit" sprang from his resentment towards Alec for being so favoured by Arthur. The relationship between Peter's father and grandfather was "almost incestuous". On one occasion, Arthur put out a banner to celebrate Alec's homecoming. "Welcome to the heir of Underhill," it said. There was no mention of Evelyn. Alec spent the last night before he was sent to the trenches not carousing but with his father. Why did Arthur lavish such favours on Alec at the expense of Evelyn? Peter says Arthur wanted a daughter. Evelyn's birth was also a difficult one. There was tension between Evelyn and Alec from a remarkably young age. Peter tells a story of Evelyn being wheeled in a pram by a nurse. A visitor arrived and asked about siblings.

The nurse replied: "He has a brother, whom he hates." Alexander Waugh is pretty scathing about Alec's paternal instincts in Fathers and Sons. "Once he picked Peter up and hurled him out of a window, but that was an aberration and he felt guilty about that for the rest of his life," he writes. Peter's version is more forgiving. "I was probably talking to the dog and being bloody irritating," he says. He was placed – not thrown – out of the window and Peter banged his head on the window frame "and Dad felt guilty about that". Alec also felt guilty, says Peter, because he went to the cinema on the day he was born. Peter does not remember much physical affection in childhood from his father. At boarding school (Peter followed his brother to Sherborne), he would relish letters containing his mother's news about their home, dog and garden. His father's letters, however, offered "no common experience". And yet his grandfather, Arthur, had written almost daily to Alec as a boy. When Peter reads the family stories of the almost flirtatious tenderness that Arthur lavished upon Alec, does he wonder why his father didn't devote such love to him?

"I was his favourite, so I got the best on offer," he says gently. He saw his father for one out of every three holidays. Alec lived mostly abroad – in France, Tangier and, later, in America with his third wife, Virginia, and only stayed in Britain for 90 days for tax reasons. Peter feels a little misrepresented at times, by everyone from Auberon to his own father. "In the intended third volume of his autobiography, he wrote of me how young women would visit and stay all summer in the hope of something more permanent to leave disappointed as the autumn leaves began to fall," says Peter. "That was complete bollocks. And when I confronted him about it he said, 'But it reads so well.' He was always the novelist, even when it came to autobiography." Then Auberon's memoirs recorded how Peter served as a waiter in the army and so was "deft with the spoons", a characteristic Wavian dig. In fact, Peter was delegated to serve as a waiter for just one night of his six months as an ordinary soldier before he became an officer. Auberon wrote the spoons line "just like his uncle Alec because it read so well," says Peter.

Despite reading these tales, Peter Waugh is surprisingly positive about belonging to a family of writers. He is proud of the Waugh name. When he meets people, "In the back of my mind, I'm expecting people to say 'Oh, are you related to ...?' It's a bit vain, I know," he chuckles. He is a realistic judge of his father's work. He was called, rather disparagingly, a popular novelist, "which of course he was and successful too – Island in the Sun, written relatively late in his life was a controversial bestseller, which made him a fortune, and his travel writing is very good," he says of his father. But when he read one of Alec's novels written at the same time as Evelyn's A Handful of Dust he admits he found his dad's prose shamefully bad in comparison with the sheer brilliance of his uncle. In contrast to his father's colourful lovelife, Peter has never married, nor has he lived with anyone. "The years have gone by and it never happened," he says. He remembers one Sunday lunch when his father was at home, playing pater familias.

"Mother was carving and he said to me, 'Sex enhances a relationship', so as a boy of 12 I thought, it's about a relationship first and then sex enhances it. Years later, I quoted it back at him and he said, 'I never felt that.'" When he met his third wife, Virginia, Alec said he saw the back of her head and that was enough – there was "initially none of this relationship stuff" says Peter. It sounds like he feels misled by his father. "Because of what my father said I think I turned my back on this stuff. Sex, I thought, was of secondary importance, which of course it isn't." Peter speaks so brightly of his father but on the page it can seem more melancholy. Did he ever bond with his dad? "I don't think I did. He was an old man when I was born and he was getting on for 50 when we first met. He wasn't the young dad playing footer and running around." Alec professed great fondness for Peter in his autobiography.

"He does flatter me an awful lot – he said I was his copain [best friend] and he would discuss his work with me, which wasn't really true," says Peter. When he visited his father in America, before he died in 1981, "I can remember an American saying to me, 'You must tell your father you love him, he's waiting for you to say that.' When I last visited him in Tampa, Virginia said, 'He gets so emotional when you are here.' I must have been an awful shit because I didn't recognise that love." Peter does, however, appreciate his dad's company and generosity in later years. "We'd have very good times together. I did have more holidays with him than my brother and sister," he says. "We did have lots of extremely nice lunches together. I went to places with him where I would never go again." Alec would take him to all his London clubs – the Athenaeum, Pratt's, Beefsteak. "We did have cosy chats. He did see me as his copain. Whether I wanted more, I don't know. That was the father I got," he says. "Did I weep when he died?

I was sad, of course, but don't know that I did. I was over 40 after all." • Alec Waugh's novels – The Loom of Youth, Island in the Sun and The Fatal Gift – have been republished as ebooks by Bloomsbury Reader, bloomsburyreader.com Bloomsbury - Alec Waugh - Alec Waugh Trade Alec Waugh Author pictures are not to be reproduced without permission. Please refer to our Terms and Conditions for full details. Alec Waugh, 1898-1981, was a British novelist born in London and educated at Sherborne Public School, Dorset. Waugh's first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), is a semi-autobiographical account of public school life that caused some controversy at the time and led to his expulsion. Waugh was the only boy ever to be expelled from The Old Shirburnian Society. Despite setting this record, Waugh went on to become the successful author of over 50 works, and lived in many exotic places throughout his life which later became the settings for some of his texts.

He was also a noted wine connoisseur and campaigned to make the 'cocktail party' a regular feature of 1920s social life. 22 April 2013, EPUB eBook $6.99 Alec Waugh (Author of Island in the Sun) edit data Born Alexander Raban Waugh to Arthur Waugh, author, literary critic, and publisher. He was the elder brother of the better-known Evelyn Waugh . His third wife was Virginia Sorenson, author of the Newbery Medal-winning Miracles on Maple Hill. Waugh was educated at Sherborne School, a public school in Dorset, from where he was expelled. The result of his experiences was his first, semi-autobiographical novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), clearly inspired by The Harrovians (1931) by Arnold Lunn, and so controversial at the time (it openly mentioned homosexual activities between boys) that Waugh remains the only former pupil to be expelled from the old boys society (The Old Shirburnian Society). It was also a best seller. Waugh went on to a career Born Alexander Raban Waugh to Arthur Waugh, author, literary critic, and publisher.

He was the elder brother of the better-known Evelyn Waugh . His third wife was Virginia Sorenson, author of the Newbery Medal-winning Miracles on Maple Hill. Waugh was educated at Sherborne School, a public school in Dorset, from where he was expelled. The result of his experiences was his first, semi-autobiographical novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), clearly inspired by The Harrovians (1931) by Arnold Lunn, and so controversial at the time (it openly mentioned homosexual activities between boys) that Waugh remains the only former pupil to be expelled from the old boys society (The Old Shirburnian Society). It was also a best seller. Waugh went on to a career as a successful author, although never as successful or innovative as his younger brother. He lived much of his life overseas, in exotic places such as Tangier - a lifestyle made possible by his second marriage, to a rich Australian. His 1957 novel Island in the Sun was a best-seller, as was his 1973 novel, A Fatal Gift.

He also published In Praise of Wine & Certain Noble Spirits (1959), an amusing and discursive guide to the major wine types, and Wines and Spirits , a 1968 book in the Time-Life series Foods of the World. Waugh is said to have invented the cocktail party when active in the 1920s London social life and served rum swizzles to astonished friends who thought they had come for tea. Within eighteen months, early evening drinks had become a widespread social entertainment. Waugh also has a footnote in the history of reggae music. The success of the film adaptation of Island in the Sun and the Harry Belafonte title track provided inspiration as well as the name for the highly successful Island Records record label. Evelyn Waugh. satirical novelist. What happened on this day in history. APRIL 10th On this day in history in 1966, died Evelyn Waugh. Waugh was a person whose only vocation in life was to comment disparagingly on the society in which he found himself, and who became the most accomplished satirical novelist of the Twentieth Century.

Waugh was born in 1903 of the respectable lower ranks of the upper class. He would have followed his elder brother, Alex, to Sherbourne School, Dorset, had it not been for the unfortunate fact that Alex, who had been sent down from Sherbourne for the usual thing, published Loom of Youth, exposing and satirising the goings on at public schools in general and Sherbourne in particular. Instead, Waugh went to Lancing School and from thence to Hertford College, Oxford where he took a Third in History. After university, Waugh took up the study of art, at which it is said that he was good, and teaching at which there is no doubt that he was bad. He took up various teaching posts, one after another (at one he was dismissed for drunkenness), all the while becoming intermingled with the vigorous social scene of the Twenties, populated by aesthetes and the boorish upper class. From these surroundings, he drew his material for his satirical novels. In 1928, Waugh published Decline and Fall, which, like Gibbonï¿½s work of the same title on Rome, traced the degeneracy of British society.

The protagonist of the novel is an Oxford student, who takes up a variety of teaching jobs and mixes with the ï¿½Bright Young Thingsï¿½, and who see first hand the degeneracy of Twenties life. Waugh went on to produce several novels in the same vein. Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, deal with the effete aristocracy and their failure to govern either the country or themselves. Black Mischief and Scoop deal with public school boys failing in their attempt to govern African colonies. All these novels achieved immediate success and presumably were read by the people whom they were satirising. During the Second World War, Waugh served with the Royal Marines and the Royal Horse Guards. In the fifties, he wrote the Sword of Honour trilogy, dealing with upper class buffoons and their attempt to run an army opposing the ruthlessness of the Nazi and Japanese regimes. After the war, his work took on a more serious vein. In 1945, he produced the classic, Brideshead Revisited, concerning a young Oxford undergraduate, at Hereford College, with artistic leanings, who comes into contact with an aristocratic family.

This novel deals more sympathetically with the upper class but the satire is still present. It evokes a lost age of the English country house and the gentile mores of a society being ravaged by the effects of war and socialism. Brideshead was such a success, that Waugh received an offer for the film rights. He travelled to Hollywood to discuss the offer with the moguls at MGM studios. Unfortunately, the studio would not agree to Waughï¿½s demand that the movie be produced in black and white. In pique and revenge, Waugh wrote The Loved One, a novel satirising American society in all its banality. Waugh was married twice, first to the honourable Evelyn Gardner, (their friends called them he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn) and secondly to Laura Herbert. Waugh was converted to Catholicism in 1930 but his obvious deep faith did not prevent the occasional lampooning in his novels of the more outrageous aspects of Catholicism. In 1957, Waugh purchased a country house in Combe Florey, at the periphery of the Quantock Hills, and lived in the style of the upper class country gentlefolk.

He died on Easter Sunday 1996, after returning from Mass. He is buried in Combe Florey churchyard. [St Peter and St Paul Church, Combe Florey, Taunton, Somerset, TA4 3JD] Alec Waugh, Man of Letters | The Evelyn Waugh Society Alec Waugh, Man of Letters Posted on January 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley In a previous post , it was mentioned that a new book by D.J. Taylor somewhat enigmatically displayed Alec Waugh's name on its cover. This is in Taylor's study of English men of letters entitled The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918 . Subsequent reviews have provided additional information about how Alec Waugh's career contributes to the book. The Herald (Glasgow) reviewer, for example, wrote : The Prose Factory is a fascinating and oddly touching examination of the often ramshackle way something as central to human identity as literature is made and funded. Peopled with rogues and eccentrics, perhaps the most representative figure in the book is the endearing journeyman Alec Waugh, elder brother of the infinitely more talented Evelyn.

Developing from an enfant terrible when his 1917 public school novel The Loom of Youth was published, to a solid novel-a-year professional in the 1930s, Waugh was reduced to writing hack-work company histories by the 1950s. Then, utterly unexpectedly, his 1956 novel Island in the Sun became a major best-seller. Serialised in American magazines, optioned for Hollywood and taken up by the Reader’s Digest, Waugh made a quarter of a million dollars in a month. For whatever reason the book chimed with the times, and it changed Waugh’s life. Today, everything he wrote is out of general print. This week's New Statesman makes the same point in their review dated 11 January: And it’s hard not to cheer when the long-suffering, near-suicidal Alec Waugh (brother of Evelyn), who said that “resilience” was the mark of a born man of letters, bets everything on a 900-page novel and wins. “By January 1956,” Taylor writes, “the month of publi­cation, Island in the Sun . . .

had racked up pre-publication earnings of nearly $500,000 – enough, as Waugh gratefully acknowledged, to set him up for life.”

Question: Alex Waugh, brother of Evelyn, wrote a first novel about life at a public school, what was it?
Answer: THE LOOM OF YOUTH